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Until now, this has been a computational challenge of “extraordinary difficulty,” the researchers wrote, with obstacles posed by different facial poses, expressions, and variable lighting.

“Typically if you want to reconstruct a face you have to try and use something called 3D morphable models, or shape from shading,” Aaron Jackson, a Ph.D. student who works on deep learning applied to human faces and who is one of the authors of the paper, told Seeker.

This method of 3D facial reconstruction analyzes shadows on the face to come up with a likely structure. It requires multiple images and poses.

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The Mossad (Hebrew: הַמוֹסָד‎, IPA: [ha moˈsad]; Arabic: الموساد‎, al-Mōsād; literally meaning “the Institute”), short for HaMossad leModiʿin uleTafkidim Meyuḥadim (Hebrew: המוסד למודיעין ולתפקידים מיוחדים‎, meaning “Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations”; Arabic: الموساد للاستخبارات والمهام الخاصة‎ al-Mōsād lil-Istikhbārāt wal-Mahāmm al-Khāṣṣah), is the national intelligence agency of Israel. It is one of the main entities in the Israeli Intelligence Community, along with Aman (military intelligence) and Shin Bet (internal security).

The Mossad is responsible for intelligence collection, covert operations, and counterterrorism, as well as bringing Jews to Israel from countries where official Aliyah agencies are forbidden, and protecting Jewish communities. Its director reports directly to the Prime Minister.

The Directorate of Military Intelligence (Hebrew: אגף המודיעין‎, Agaf HaModi’in — lit. “the Intelligence Section”, often abbreviated to Aman) is the central, overarching military intelligence body of the Israel Defense Forces. Aman was created in 1950, when the Intelligence Department was spun off from the IDF’s General Staff (then, Agam: אג”ם); the Intelligence Department itself was composed largely of former members of the Haganah Intelligence Service (HIS). Aman is an independent service, and not part of the ground forces, navy or the Israeli Air Force.
It is one of the main entities in the Israeli Intelligence Community, along with Mossad (national intelligence) and Shin Bet (general security). It is currently headed by Major General Aviv Kochavi. It has a staff of 7,000 personnel (1996 estimate). Its special forces and field-reconnaissance unit is Sayeret Matkal.

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The news that the U.S. government has been recording data from phone calls and Internet activity, broken by former CIA employee Edward Snowden, is just the latest in a long line of legendary leaks. Here are some of the most notorious leaks in U.S. history.

The Pentagon Papers

What may be the most famous leak in U.S. history occurred in June 1971, when The New York Times published sections of a top-secret Department of Defense report on the country’s involvement in Vietnam from 1945-1967. Dubbed the “Pentagon Papers,” the report detailed how the Johnson administration and others repeatedly misled Congress and the public about the causes and progress of the Vietnam War, according to the History Channel. [7 Great Dramas in Congressional HistoryThe report was leaked by antiwar activist Daniel Ellsberg,

a former Defense Department analyst working for the RAND Corp., who stole it from the Pentagon and sent copies to the Times. The Pentagon Papers’ publication fueled the antiwar movement and sparked a debate over the freedom of the press to divulge “classified” information and the public’s right to know about government affairs. President Richard Nixon tried but failed to get the Supreme Court to prevent further publication of the papers.

The Watergate Scandal

One of the best-known leaks, of course, is the Watergate scandal of Richard Nixon’s presidency. On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate hotel complex in Washington, D.C., and installing illegal wiretaps. The men were linked to a fundraising group for Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign, but the Nixon administration denied any involvement.

Later in 1972, Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward exposed the administration’s role in the scandal and cover-up. Their key source was an informant nicknamed “Deep Throat,” who was later revealed to be former FBI agent W. Mark Felt. A series of Senate hearings nailed the lid on Nixon’s coffin, and he resigned from the presidency in 1974 — the first president to do so. [The 10 Weirdest Presidential Inaugurations in US History]

The Iraq War Logs (WikiLeaks)

The so-called “Iraq War Logs” were just one of many leaks made by the non-profit organization WikiLeaks, founded by Australian journalist and activist Julian Paul Assange. The organization publishes secret or classified information or news from anonymous sources. In October 2010, WikiLeaks published Army field reports from 2004 to 2009 that listed the number of civilian deaths as 66,081 out of 109,000 total recorded deaths. The leaked logs confirmed some partially reported events. For instance, some American troops had been classifying civilian deaths as enemy deaths. The Iraq War Logs represent the largest leak in U.S. history.

The Plame Affair

In 2003, a case of leaked identity ended the career of a CIA agent. On July 6, 2003, The New York Times published an Op-Ed by former U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson, which questioned the reasons given by President George W. Bush’s administration for invading Iraq earlier in 2003. Wilson, who had been a CIA envoy to Niger in 2002, said Bush’s claim that Iraq had attempted to buy enriched uranium yellowcake — a step toward enriched uranium but not weapons-grade yet — from Niger was unsubstantiated. In response, Washington Post columnist Robert Novak wrote a column on July 14, 2003 criticizing Wilson and referring to Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as an “agency operative” — blowing her cover. Wilson accused the White House of leaking Plame’s identity as retribution for his Op-Ed, prompting an investigation. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald interviewed Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials and journalists. New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who conducted interviews in the leak but had never written an article about it, refused to testify and was held in contemp. She served time at a federal detention center, but was released after three months when Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, signed a waiver granting Miller permission to speak.

In 2007, Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements to government investigators. Libby was sentenced to prison, but Bush later reduced his sentence.

Climategate

Named in the Watergate tradition, “Climategate” refers to a controversy in the fall of 2009 in which hackers leaked thousands of emails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. The documents appeared to show scientists suppressing the publication of research undermining the existence of global warming. Even though an investigation later revealed no foul play was afoot, the leak added fuel to the global warming debate. Climate change critics claimed the leaked emails showed that global warming was a conspiracy among scientists, while the CRU said the emails were taken out of context.

The documents were leaked just weeks before the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. In response, the scientific community released statements affirming the consensus that the planet’s average surface temperature is rising as a result of human activities.

Operation Mincemeat

Not all leaks are about exposing the truth — some are about deception. Such was the case with Operation Mincemeat, a leak planned and executed by the Allies during World War II. The plan, part of the larger Operation Barclay, was intended to make the Germans think the Allies were planning to invade Greece and Sardinia instead of Sicily. The Allies put fake “top secret” invasion plans on a dead body that was left to wash up on a beach in Spain. The plan worked: The Germans found the body and copied the fake plans. The trickery made the Germans suspicious, so they ignored other real intelligence leaks, thinking they were ruses.

Edward Snowden and the PRISM leak

On June 6, 2013, The Guardian broke the news that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting the phone records of millions of customers of Verizon, the U.S. telecom provider, as authorized by a top-secret court order issued in April. Technical contractor and former CIA employee Edward Snowden leaked classified details of a top-secret NSA electronic surveillance program, codenamed PRISM, to The Washington Post and The Guardian.

Via this program, the NSA can obtain information such as email, voice and video chat, other videos, photos, and social networking details, according to The Guardian. The NSA and FBI are obtaining data from the central servers of nine major Internet companies, including Google, Facebook and Apple, The Washington Post reported. The leak has launched criticism of President Barack Obama’s administration over breach-of-privacy concerns. The president has defended the surveillance program, claiming it has helped prevent terrorist attacks. The controversy continues, as more details of the surveillance programs are unveiled.

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29 November 1999. Thanks to The New Yorker and SH.
Source: Hardcopy The New Yorker, December 6, 1999, pp. 58-76.

ANNALS OF NATIONAL SECURITY
___________________

THE INTELLIGENCE GAP

How the digital age left our spies out in the cold.

BY SEYMOUR M. HERSH

THE National Security Agency, whose Cold War research into code breaking and electronic eavesdropping spurred the American computer revolution, has become a victim of the high-tech world it helped to create. Through mismanagement, arrogance, and fear of the unknown, the senior military and civilian bureaucrats who work at the agency’s headquarters, in suburban Fort Meade, Maryland, have failed to prepare fully for today’s high-volume flow of E-mail and fibre-optic transmissions — even as nations throughout Europe, Asia, and the Third World have begun exchanging diplomatic and national-security messages encrypted in unbreakable digital code.

The N.S.A.’s failures don’t make the headlines. In May, 1998, India’s first round of nuclear tests, which took place in Pokharan, southwest of New Delhi, caught Washington by surprise, and provoked criticism of the Central Intelligence Agency from the press and from Congress. But it was the N.S.A., in the days and weeks before the detonations, that did not detect signs of increased activity or increased communications at Pokharan. “It’s a tough problem,” one nuclear-intelligence expert told me, because India’s nuclear-weapons establishment now sends encrypted digital messages by satellite, using small dishes that bounce signals beyond the stratosphere through a system known as VSAT (“very small aperture terminal”) — a two-way version of the system widely used for DirecTV.

Similarly, the North Koreans, with the help of funds from the United Nations, according to one United States intelligence official, have bought encrypted cell phones from Europe, high-speed switching gear from Britain, and up-to-date dialling service from America — a system that the N.S.A. cannot readily read. The official said of the North Koreans,”All their military stuff went off ether into fibre” — from high-frequency radio transmission to fibre-optic cable lines, which transmit a vast volume of digital data as a stream of light. A former high-level Defense Department official told me, “It’s a worldwide problem. You could wire up all of Africa for less than two billion dollars.” This former official, like most of the two dozen signals-intelligence (SIGINT) experts interviewed for this account, agreed to speak only after being assured of anonymity. A 1951 federal law prohibits any discussion or publication of communications intelligence.

The decline of the N.S.A. is widely known in Washington’s national-security community. “The dirty little secret is that fibre optics and encryption are kicking Fort Meade in the nuts,” a recently retired senior officer in the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Operations told me. “It’s over. Everywhere I went in the Third World, I wanted to have someone named Ahmed, a backhoe driver, on the payroll. And I wanted to know where the fibre-optic cable was hidden. In a crisis, I wanted Ahmed to go and break up the cable, and force them up in the air” — that is, force communications to be broadcast by radio signals. The number of daily satellite-telephone calls in the Arab world, many of which are encrypted, is in the millions, creating severe difficulties for eavesdroppers. The mobile-telephone system used by Saddam Hussein at the height of Iraq’s dispute last year with a United Nations arms-control inspection team operated on more than nine hundred channels. Each channel was separately encrypted, with multiple keys, and Saddam’s conversations bounced from channel to channel with each call. A U.N. intelligence team eventually gained access to the telephone system’s technical manuals and other data, and was able to record the encrypted conversations, but without these materials it could not have made sense of the intercepts. The code-makers are leaving the code-breakers far behind.

IN its heyday, during the Cold War, the N.S.A. had nearly ninety-five thousand employees, more than half of them military, monitoring communications from hundreds of sites around the world. It played a dominant role in American intelligence gathering behind the Iron Curtain and elsewhere, producing by the end of the nineteen-sixties more than a thousand intelligence reports a day. The N.S.A.’s intercepts were the government’s most reliable and important sources of intelligence on the Soviet Union — far outstripping the intelligence collected by the C.I.A. and its agents abroad. In Western Europe, N.S.A. linguists and Army G.I.s sat in unmarked vans monitoring the daily conversations of Soviet tank units on the other side of the Berlin Wall. In the Pacific, Air Force radiomen and N.S.A. technicians, in specially configured Boeing 707s, flew huge figure eights over the ocean, copying Morse-code transmissions from North Korea and the Soviet Far East. In the Mediterranean, Navy signalmen worked hectic shifts with their N.S.A. colleagues, eavesdropping on government communications in the Middle East. Many of the most sophisticated Soviet codes were broken, including the diplomatic traffic to Moscow from its Embassy in Washington. By the time President Nixon was in office, the agency was listening to telephone conversations of Soviet leaders as they were driven in limousines to and from the Kremlin. In the upper reaches of the United States government, access to the agency’s daily top-secret “take” was a sign of importance and success. Henry A. Kissinger, Nixon’s national-security adviser, went as far as to order the agency to scan the diplomatic traffic from Washington, isolate references to him, and deliver the cables to his office, without any further distribution inside the government. Many of his successors have received the same service.

These successes were the payoff for years of painstaking technical research. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the N.S.A.’s engineers, working closely with the American computer industry, coordinated and financed much of the early work in telecommunications, underwriting research on semiconductors, high-speed circuitry, and transistorized computers. With its research into microelectronics, the agency also helped to develop the early guidance systems for intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles. And the agency’s team of mathematicians — aided by outside advisers, many of whom were tenured at places such as Harvard, Dartmouth, and Princeton — steadily tore through the Soviet cipher systems.

By the mid-seventies, as the world began routinely communicating by microwave, the agency maintained its edge with innovative use of satellite intelligence, and its mathematicians and computer experts were sometimes able to thwart the Russians’ attempts to scramble their signals. Even undersea and underground coaxial cables — the most secure means then of relaying telephone conversations and electronic communications — could be intercepted. Books and newspaper articles have described the penetration of Soviet cables at sea by N.S.A. units aboard Navy submarines as some of the most daring intelligence operations of the Cold War.

The collapse of Communism, in 1989, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, led to a revised mission for the N.S.A., with more focus on international terrorism and drug dealing — both highly elusive targets. The agency’s budget was cut back. In the early nineties, as more nations turned to fibre optics, the N.S.A. shut down twenty of its forty-two radio listening posts around the world. (In some cases, equipment was left behind to be monitored remotely.) The agency’s overseas military personnel have been reduced by half.

The N.S.A.’s status within the government has also been diminished. Last year, Richard Lardner, a reporter for the Washington newsletter Inside the Pentagon, revealed that the agency had been “reined in” and would no longer be authorized to report directly to the Secretary of Defense. The N.S.A. was ordered instead to report through an Assistant Secretary. In recent years, according to a congressional study, the N.S.A.’s contribution to the President’s daily intelligence brief — a secret summary prepared at the C.I.A. every morning for the White House — has fallen by nearly twenty per cent. The N.S.A. was being jarred by the difficulties of tracking terrorism, and by the rapid spread of unbreakable codes. The agency also discovered that it had few advocates in the White House and among those officials at the Office of Management and Budget who control the flow of money to the top-secret world. The agency was not allowed to keep the funds it had saved by reducing manpower and drastically cutting overseas stations.

The N.S.A. is also getting very little help from its colleagues in the American intelligence community. One legislative aide told me that George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, who has nominal responsibility for all intelligence gathering, had expressed alarm upon taking office about the N.S.A.’s weakness, and told congressmen of his desire to rescue the agency from what appeared to be a “precipitous calamity.” But, the aide added,” he didn’t do it.”

The N.S.A.’s strongest supporters — the members and staffs of the Senate and House intelligence committees — are also its most vocal critics. The agency is now facing the most caustic congressional scrutiny in its history, amid much pessimism that it can right itself without major changes in its management. Staff members of the intelligence-oversight committees traditionally prefer not to be quoted by name, but John Millis, a former C.I.A. officer who is staff director of the House intelligence committee, openly discussed the N.S.A.’s problems in the fall of 1998 at a luncheon meeting with a group of retired C.I.A. officers. “Signals intelligence is in a crisis,” Millis told his former colleagues, who reprinted the speech in a newsletter. “We have been living in the glory days of SIGINT over the last fifty years, since World War II.” He went on, “Technology has been the friend of the N.S.A., but in the last four or five years technology has moved from being the friend to being the enemy.” Millis also made it clear that any significant increase in the agency’s budget was made more difficult by the fact that”there is no management of the intelligence community. There is no one in a position to make the tradeoffs within the intelligence community that will make a coherent, efficient organization that will function as a whole. So we end up doing it on Capitol Hill. And I’ve got to tell you, if you are depending on Capitol Hill to do something as important as this, you’re in trouble.”

SENATOR ROBERT KERREY, of Nebraska, the ranking Democrat on the Senate’s intelligence committee, told me that there was little he could add to Millis’s assessment, because most information dealing with the agency and its work is highly classified. Kerrey also pointed out that secrecy “does not equal security,” and can be self-defeating. For example, the agency is in desperate need of more money to get started on information-retrieval programs for the Internet which should have been under way years ago. “But I can’t tell you how much they need,” Kerrey said, “and I can’t tell you how much they have. The public doesn’t know about the N.S.A., or what it is. There are no editorials in the New York Times, no advocates. Does the public know that the nation might be more secure if more was invested? Out of sight, out of mind.”

Last July, during a little-noticed Senate colloquy on an intelligence-spending bill, Kerrey hinted at the N.S.A.’s problems. “The signals are becoming more complex and difficult to process,” he said. “And they are becoming more and more encrypted.” Because of the sophistication of current encryption systems for E-mail and other communications,” he said, “we will find our people on the intelligence side coming back and saying, ‘Look, I know something bad happened . . . I couldn’t make sense of the signal. We intercept, and all we get is a buzz and background noise. We cannot interpret. We can’t convert it.’ ”

Kerrey says that his concern was heightened by a report on the N.S.A. that was filed last year by an unusual study group that he and Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama and the committee’s chairman, had put together. Secret congressional studies are routine, but the Senate team, known as the Technical Advisory Group, included a number of prominent outsiders — men who were in charge of re search and technology for major American high-tech corporations, such as George Spix, of Microsoft, Bran Ferren, of the Walt Disney Company, and a nuclear-weapons physicist, Dr. Lowell Wood, of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The outsiders were given full clearance and access to many of the most sensitive areas at the Fort Meade headquarters. Their conclusions were devastating. “We told them that unless you totally change your intelligence-collection systems you will go deaf,” one involved official told me. “You’ve got ten years.”

The advisory group put much of the blame for the agency’s problems on the stagnation and rigidity of the senior civilian management. “The N.S.A.’s party line to Congress is ‘We’re fine. We don’t need to change,’ ” the official told me. “It’s like a real Communist organization. Free thought is not encouraged” among the managers. Referring to the senior bureaucracy, the official said that the agency would “have to fire almost everyone.” This official and others singled out Barbara A. McNamara, the current N.S.A. deputy director, as someone especially resistant to change. “She’s leading a cohort of thirty-year veterans who go back to radio” — a reference to high-frequency radio transmissions — “and think nothing is needed,” the official said. In secret testimony this fall before Congress, he added, McNamara talked about “how good the N.S.A. is — how it caught this and that drug guy. They got a whole bunch of horseshit from Barbara.”

In subsequent interviews, many former N.S.A. managers endorsed the advisory group’s findings. One former official described the civilian leadership as “a self-licking ice-cream cone,” with little tolerance for dissent or information it did not wish to hear. “If you didn’t support their position, you weren’t considered a team player,” this person told me. “You couldn’t go into a meeting, put your best ideas on the table, have it out, get the best idea, and then go have a beer.” McNamara’s authority stems from her longevity: the admirals and generals who serve the agency director remain on the job for an average of three years before retiring or going on to other military assignments. The agency’s top civilians have worked together, in many cases, for nearly thirty years, and inevitably share the same insular points of view. Another recently retired official told me that the N.S.A. has become a dynastic bureaucracy, in which the fathers have made room for their sons, with the wives and mothers of favored employees hired as mid-level staff in the human-resources office. “The place is full of warlords and fiefdoms,” the former official said. “Now we’re getting to the grandchildren.” Such insider hiring has led to the quip, which I heard from a number of officials, that the N.S.A. functions as a “Glen Burnie W.P.A. project.” Glen Burnie is a nearby suburb, and home to many N.S.A. employees. Questions also were raised during my interviews about the effectiveness of many of the senior military officers who are routinely assigned to the N.S.A. for two-, three-, or four-year tours of duty. Some perform brilliantly, but far too many find themselves put in charge of units for which they are unqualified, and end up relying extensively on their civilian staffs. “We call them the summer help,” a former manager told me, adding that the smart ones generally seek to get reassigned as soon as possible.

The Technical Advisory Group urged that the agency immediately begin a major reorganization, and start planning for the recruitment of several thousand skilled computer scientists. One of their missions would be to devise software and write information-retrieval programs that would enable the agency to make sense of the data routinely sucked up by satellite and other interception devices. The vast majority of telephone calls, E-mails, and faxes are not encrypted — almost all are sent as plain text — but the N.S.A. has been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the intercepted data, much of which is irrelevant. “They’re still collecting a lot of digital,” one of the agency’s consultants told me,”and can’t do anything with it.” The consultant added that agency managers recently estimated that Fort Meade had three years’ worth of storage capacity for intercepted Internet traffic. “They filled it in eleven months,” he said.

“The bottom line is they’ve got to retool,” the advisory-group official said. “It will take a lot of money and effort — like starting the N.S.A. again.” Far from being able to retool, the agency has suffered a severe brain drain in recent years, losing mid-career managers to the high pay and upward mobility of private industry. One former senior official described the process as self-defeating: the agency’s recognized need for more outside contact with, and stimulation by, the computer world is offset by the fact that its budding young experts “meet new people and then get hired away by them.”

THE N.S.A.’s current alienation from the computer gurus in industry and academia might not have occurred if two Californians with a fascination for the mathematics of cryptoanalysis hadn’t decided to compare notes more than two decades ago. A 1951 law gave the government the right to classify as secret any invention considered potentially harmful to national security, but in November, 1976, Whitfield Diffie, a computer scientist, and Martin E. Hellman, a Stanford University electrical engineer, published a revolutionary technical paper on what has become known as public key cryptography Before their work, an encrypted message could be understood only if the sender and receiver had the same key, or decoder, to turn the scrambled letters into readable text. The beauty of the Diffie-Hellman breakthrough was its simplicity: the message would have two keys — one could be registered in a public directory (today it might be on the Internet) and the other would be known only to the intended recipient. One key would be used to encipher the message and the other to decipher it. A senior N.S.A. official has described the Diffie-Hellman concept as a series of computations that are easy to do but hard to reverse, like breaking a window.

To the agency’s dismay, the world now had access to a sophisticated level of cryptography that had not been previously fully understood even by N.S.A. analysts. In 1978, when George I. Davida, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin, tried to patent an encryption device he had invented, the N.S.A. invoked the 1951 secrecy law. Davida took his case to the media, and the agency, prodded by attorneys in the Carter Administration, eventually backed down, but the message was clear — the agency would do all it could to prevent public access to encryption techniques.

By the early nineties, the telephone system had been deregulated, the computer market was booming, and the Internet was beginning its ride, but the N.S.A.’s policy remained static: encryption was defined as a a weapons system whose export was controlled by the government. The debate over encryption was now a public controversy, with the government arrayed against privacy advocates, academics, and a computer industry that was bemoaning the annual loss of billions of dollars to foreign manufacturers whose computers included high-powered encryption.

In 1993, law-enforcement officials further infuriated the computer industry by beginning a criminal investigation of Philip R. Zimmermann, a software engineer then living in Boulder, Colorado. Zimmermann’s crime was being a free-spirited hacker; he cobbled together a cryptography program called P.G.P. — for Pretty Good Privacy — and gave it away. P.G.P. was the agency’s nightmare — it offered the average computer user a nontechnical and nonthreatening entry into easy, daily use of cryptography. P.G.P. soon found its way to the Internet, and it quickly spread around the world — making Zimmermann, in the government’s view, an exporter of munitions. A grand jury inquiry began. The computer industry rallied around Zimmermann, and after three years the case was dropped. Zimmermann eventually explained to a Senate committee, “I wrote P.G.P. from information in the open literature…. This technology belongs to everybody.” By the mid-nineteen-nineties, the Software Publishers Association was telling journalists that the number of cryptographic products being sold by foreign companies had reached three hundred and forty.

President Clinton and his senior advisers, under pressure from the law-enforcement and national-security communities, tried to compromise on the issue. The export of encryption for computers could go forward, the government said, if the industry agreed to install a government-approved encryption chip, known as the Clipper Chip, that could be directly accessed by law-enforcement officers. Under another proposal, American computer manufacturers would have been permitted to export new encryption products if a spare set of decoding keys were accessible to the government. The proposals, known as key recovery or key escrow, were assailed by privacy proponents, who demanded to know whether the Clinton Administration would have dared to advocate that citizens be required to give the keys to their house or safety-deposit box to a third person.

The cultural divide between Fort Meade and Silicon Valley was widening. The agency’s senior managers were unable to comprehend what every programmer and researcher in academia and industry intuitively understood: encryption could not be stopped. The managers had ample warning. In 1991, a secret study predicted that the use of encryption would grow exponentially — a prediction largely ignored by the agency’s senior management. A former N.S.A. director recalled that in the early nineties he had had a series of conversations with the civilian managers, urging them not to insist on their version of key recovery. “I couldn’t believe their proposals,” he said, adding that he had warned the managers that, given the public’s attitude toward privacy, key recovery “could not work if the government held the key. They were so arrogant. They knew all there was to know.”

“Export control is a legitimate concern to the agency,” one former senior official told me, but the issue made the top managers “paralyzed and afraid to move into the future.” He and many colleagues had argued for a two-prong approach — continuing to do all that was possible to maintain export controls while also planning for a fully encrypted world. The agency’s long fight against encryption delayed its widespread use by many years, but the agency’s senior managers spent those years “holding on to what we have today” instead of seeking ways to lessen encryption’s impact. The official lamented, “We were squandering time” while continuing to make more enemies inside the computer industry.

Today, the encryption fight is all but over. The Commerce Department is scheduled to issue new export regulations on December 15th that, many experts believe, will permit American computer companies to include advanced cryptography, with fewer restrictions, on equipment sold worldwide. “We’ve won,” Phil Zimmermann told me, jubilantly. “And they tried to put me in prison! Now we can export strong crypto and they can’t stop us. We can do whatever we wish.”

N.S.A.’s short-term solution to the encryption dilemma has been to urge the C.I.A. to go back to the world of dirty tricks and surreptitious entry. According to a 1996 congressional staff study, the next century will require a clandestine agency that “breaks into or otherwise gains access to the contents of secured facilities, safes and computers” and “steals, compromises and influences foreign cryptographic capabilities so as to make them exploitable” by the N.S.A.

Such information theoretically could help Washington policymakers disrupt future terrorist activity, intercept illicit shipments of nuclear arms, or uncover acts of espionage against American defense corporations. Unfortunately, several C.I.A. officers I spoke with found the proposal too ambitious. One retired case officer told me that while he was on a clandestine assignment years ago in the Third World, “I was designated to get a certain black box. I worked on it for three and a half years, and I got nowhere. If I had worked on it for ten years, and with a true stroke of luck, I might have gotten within ten feet of it.” Another retired operations officer, similarly skeptical of the C.I.A.’s chances of obtaining cryptological intelligence, told me that sometimes the clandestine operatives in the field have to report back, “This is too hard. ”

Many Americans, of course, are deeply distrustful of the N.S.A. — a view reflected in recent Hollywood movies like “Enemy of the State” and “Mercury Rising.” The traditional American belief in privacy and constitutional protection is at odds with a superspy agency capable of monitoring unencrypted telephone conversations and E-mail exchanges anywhere in the world. Abuses have occurred. In the nineteen-seventies, the Senate intelligence committee revealed that the agency had systematically violated the law by surveilling American citizens, including more than twelve hundred anti-war and civil-rights activists. The revelations led to a public outcry and to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which made monitoring of American targets illegal without a warrant from a special federal court. (The court rarely turns down such requests from the government.) The act, and a supporting executive order, set rules for the handling of intercepts or other intelligence involving Americans who were overheard or picked up in the course of legitimate foreign surveillance.

The N.S.A.’s bitter fight over encryption, with its tell-all computer chips and key-recovery proposals, has renewed long-standing fears that one of the agency’s satellite-data collection programs, code-named ECHELON, is routinely collecting and analyzing unencrypted telephone conversations and Internet chatter around the world. ECHELON was launched, in the mid-nineteen-seventies, to spy on Soviet satellite communications. “Imagine,” the BBC exclaimed last month — one of hundreds of such reports in the past ten years — “a global spying network that can eavesdrop on every single phone call, fax, or E-mail, anywhere on the planet. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s true.” The agency does routinely collect vast amounts of digital data, and it is capable of targeting an individual telephone line or computer terminal in many places around the world. But active and retired N.S.A. officials have repeatedly told me that the agency does not yet have the software to make sense out of more than a tiny fraction of the huge array of random communications that are collected. If the agency were able to filter through the traffic, the officials noted, international terrorists like Osama bin Laden would not be able to remain in hiding.

The fact is that ECHELON, far from being one of the N.S.A.’s secret weapons, as some believe, is viewed as a fiscal black hole by the Senate and House intelligence committees. John Millis, in his private talk to the retired C.I.A agents, complained that the United States was spending “incredible amounts of money” on satellite collection. “It threatens to overwhelm the intelligence budget.” Using satellites to sweep up communications indiscriminately, he said, “doesn’t make a lot of sense…. You shouldn’t be spending one more dollar than we do to try and intercept communications from space.” Millis’s point was that the data collected from satellites, like the data collected from the Internet, cannot be sorted or analyzed in any meaningful way.

THE agency’s critics, in and out of the government, told me that they see a glimmer of hope for the N.S.A. in the appointment, last May, of Lieutenant General Michael Hayden as its new director. Hayden, who joined the Air Force after earning a master’s degree in American history at Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh, has been praised for his intelligence and open-mindedness. “Hayden gets it,” one intelligence-committee aide told me. “But he’s parachuted in there, and faced with a deputy director whose job is to foil what the director wants to do. There’s no question that it’s the hardest job in the intelligence community. He’s got to manage a multibillion-dollar corporation that has a blue-collar mentality.”

General Hayden’s initial goal will be to convince Congress and the White House that he can do what his predecessors did not — develop a specific management plan and a budget for analyzing intelligence from the Internet and other digital sources. “We’ve criticized the N.S.A. for not having a well-coordinated strategy,” one legislative aide told me, “but we’re not in a position to tell them where to go.” The issues, of course, are highly technical, and it’s not clear that more money — even billions of dollars — will get the job done. The amount of data flowing through the Internet is growing exponentially, and skilled computer scientists are at a premium. The agency’s war against encryption has left a legacy of bitterness throughout the computer industry, and today’s technical advances are taking place not at Fort Meade but on university campuses and in corporation laboratories across America. Those computer whizzes who might have been attracted to high-level government work are instead being attracted by the far higher pay scales offered by private industry.

There also is little evidence that President Clinton and his national-security team view the agency’s signals-intelligence plight as significant. This year’s classified Defense Department budget request included a boost of nearly two hundred million dollars for the agency, with the funds ear-marked for long-range research into signals intelligence. The money never made it through the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, however. “George Tenet didn’t support it,” a former congressional aide explained. A similar secret request, for four hundred million dollars or more to modify the Jimmy Carter, a Seawolf-class nuclear submarine, for top-secret agency intelligence work, was approved — evidence that the White House believes that more covert operations will solve the nation’s coming intelligence problems.

Hayden also will have to contend with those, in and out of the government, who remain dubious about the N.S.A. One firm skeptic is the encryption expert Whitfield Diffie, who is now at Sun Microsystems. Diffie, a leading advocate of computer privacy, was quick to suggest that the current alarm in the N.S.A. may be a self-interested ruse. When I brought up the N.S.A.’s problems with new technology, he replied, “What bothers me is that you are saying what the agency wants us to believe — they used to be great, but these days they have trouble reading the newspaper, the Internet is too complicated for them, there is so much traffic and they can’t find what they want. It may be true, but it is what they have been ‘saying’ for years. It’s convenient for N.S.A. to have its targets believe it is in trouble. That doesn’t mean it isn’t in trouble, but it is a reason to view what spooky inside informants say with skepticism.”

Shortly after his appointment, Hayden assembled a group of highly regarded mid-level managers and gave them free rein to evaluate the agency. He also began a series of meetings, outside Fort Meade, to get independent advice. The evaluations were consistently “brutal,” according to one official, in terms of the ongoing management problems. On November 15th, Hayden announced to the N.S.A. workforce that he was beginning what he called One Hundred Days of Change. The next day, he made his move against the establishment. He dissolved the agency’s leadership structure, despite a bitter protest from Barbara McNamara, and announced the formation of a five-member executive group, under his leadership, which would be responsible for decision-making.

LAST month, General Hayden agreed to speak to me, at his unpretentious top-floor offices at Ops 2, the N.S.A. headquarters building. He is an affable spymaster, who laughs easily, offers no slogans, and promises no quick fixes for the agency’s problems. He seemed to understand that his new troops — computer gurus and mathematicians — are unlike any others he had commanded before.

When I brought up the agency’s long-standing war against the export of encryption, Hayden quickly dismissed it as yesterday’s lost battle. He also took issue with those who criticized Barbara McNamara and other civilian managers for their failure to anticipate the communications upheaval. “Barbara McNamara has been a good deputy to me,” he said. “But I make the decisions.”

Hayden emphasized that the personnel problems are far less significant than the technological ones: “The issue is not people but external changes. For the N.S.A., technology is a two-edged sword. If technology in the outside world races away from us — at breakneck speed — our mission is more difficult. It can be our enemy.”

When I asked Hayden about the agency’s capability for unwarranted spying on private citizens — in the unlikely event, of course, that the agency could somehow get the funding, the computer scientists, and the knowledge to begin making sense out of the Internet — his response was heated. “I’m a kid from Pittsburgh with two sons and a daughter who are closet libertarians,” he said. “I am not interested in doing anything that threatens the American people, and threatens the future of this agency. I can’t emphasize enough to you how careful we are. We have to be so careful — to make sure that America is never distrustful of the power and security we can provide.”

General Hayden made no effort to minimize his agency’s plight. During the Cold War, he said, the N.S.A. was “technologically more adept than our adversary. Now it’s harder to predict where America!s interests will need to be in the future.” His goal in the near future, he added, speaking carefully, is to determine which of the agency’s past practices are applicable to today’s high-tech world — “and which of them may be counterproductive.”

“A lot of the choices are Sophie’s choices,” he said. “The trade-off is between modernizations (recruiting computer scientists and beginning long-range programs to tackle the Internet) “and readiness” — that is, meeting the hectic operational needs of the Defense Department and the White House for immediate intelligence. “We have a high ops tempo,” he added, “but choices have to be made.” In other words, he made clear, some ongoing N.S.A. intelligence-collection programs will have to be curtailed, or eliminated, so that funds are available for futuristic research.

“In its forty-year struggle against Soviet Communism,” Hayden noted, “the N.S.A. was thorough, stable, and focussed.” Then he asked “What’s changed?” and he answered, “All of that.”

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China’s Military: Culture Field Guide

81 pages

For Official Use Only

September 2009

China’s Military Culture Field Guide is designed to provide deploying military personnel an overview of China’s military cultural terrain. In this field guide, China’s military cultural history has been synopsized to capture the more significant aspects of China’s military cultural environment, with emphasis on factors having the greatest potential to impact operations.

The field guide presents background information to show China’s military mind-set through its history, values, and internal dynamics. It also contains practical sections on lifestyle, customs, and habits. For those seeking more extensive information, MCIA produces a series of cultural intelligence studies on China’s military that explores the dynamics of China’s military culture at a deeper level.

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The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is the world’s largest standing army; it protects the world’s fastestrising economic power. In recent years, U.S. personnel have gained a much greater understanding of the PLA’s equipment and capabilities. However, knowledge of the values, beliefs, and essential cultural features that influence the way PLA members behave, interact, and make decisions is much less widespread. This field guide is aimed at U.S. personnel who will interact with Chinese military personnel but have limited knowledge of China or the PLA. The guide is intended to help readers better understand why PLA members act as they do and how the PLA differs from the U.S. military. This guide is divided into three parts. “Who is the PLA?” provides background on the PLA’s structure and personnel and discusses how the PLA is transforming itself.“How the PLA Sees Itself” traces the beliefs the PLA promotes about its origins, historical legacies, and key values. “Understanding PLA Actions” describes key aspects of PLA behavior, including its changing operational practices and its decision-making principles and processes, and discusses how U.S. personnel can most effectively interact with PLA members.

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The PLA is a Party-Army: its missions, institutions, and practices are all shaped by the fact that its ultimate loyalty is to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Change is a key element of PLA culture. The PLA is undergoing tremendous changes in its personnel system and its operational doctrine and practices. It is experiencing the “growing pains” of its transformation from a peasant army to a modern military. The PLA promotes the view that its greatest strengths are the morale and discipline of its personnel, and that these qualities enable the PLA to compensate for weak material capabilities. However, PLA leaders worry that these “human qualities” are increasingly difficult to maintain in a rapidly changing society.

U.S. personnel are often frustrated by the different expectations that the PLA and the U.S. military bring to military-to-military interactions. However, U.S. personnel can improve the quality of these exchanges by gaining an understanding of the PLA’s professional and cultural norms and an appreciation of what its members seek to gain from interaction with the U.S. military.

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Looking for a Few Good Men

According to a popular saying in imperial China, “Just as good iron is not forged into nails, good men do not become soldiers.” Today’s PLA faces immense difficulties in attracting the “good men” it needs in order to build the high-quality fighting force it wants. Based on the demands of 21st century warfare, the PLA now seeks:

● Conscripts from urban, educated backgrounds
● Officers who are better educated and more technically capable
● Personnel who are innovative and willing to take risks

However, due to recent changes in Chinese society, young people with strong skills have a wide range of opportunities in the private sector or overseas. Despite reforms to the personnel system, PLA leaders remain concerned that the PLA has too many:

● Conscripts who are rural, uneducated, and poor
● Officers who stay too long in their positions and are too slow to adapt to new techniques and technologies
● Personnel (particularly officers) who are conservative and risk averse

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Recent Issues

● In 2002 China’s official news service reported that most PLA barracks finally had year-round electricity, heat, air conditioning, and indoor plumbing.
● In 2003 a PLAN depot reported that it was rethinking its earlier refusal to install air conditioning in the quarters for NCOs’ visiting family members. This refusal had resulted from concerns that if the quarters were too comfortable, family members would stay too long.
● In 2005 a PLAAF newspaper proudly reported that a tactical unit had installed 17 new showers, so that the troops could have one hot shower per week.
● In 2006 the leaders of a Second Artillery unit, concerned that unit personnel would be “tempted” by the bars and markets of a nearby town, built a wall around the unit compound to keep personnel inside. Personnel simply climbed over it to go into town, for such purposes as calling their families and taking uniforms to the dry cleaners.

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Suspicion of Foreigners

Today’s PLA members—and Chinese citizens more generally—still display a sense of wounded pride over what they call the “Century of Humiliation,” the period between 1840 and 1949 when China lost sovereignty, power, and human lives to foreign invaders. Because of these bitter memories, Chinese resistance to foreign interference is very strong. PRC leaders and intellectuals interpret many U.S. actions as evidence that the United States is determined to keep China from gaining global influence.

The CCP actively encourages the PLA to distrust foreign intentions. For instance, President Hu Jintao, in a 2004 speech on the PLA’s main tasks, warned that “Western hostile forces have not given up the wild ambition of trying to subjugate us, intensifying the political strategy of westernizing and dividing up China.” U.S. guests of the PLA may be surprised to find their hosts questioning the intentions of the U.S. government and people toward China during seemingly unrelated conversations.

PARLIAMENTARY OVERSIGHT OF SECURITY AND INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

446 pages

June 2011

This study evaluates the oversight of national security and intelligence agencies by parliaments and specialised non-parliamentary oversight bodies, with a view to identifying good practices that can inform the European Parliament’s approach to strengthening the oversight of Europol, Eurojust, Frontex and, to a lesser extent, Sitcen. The study puts forward a series of detailed recommendations (including in the field of access to classified information) that are formulated on the basis of in-depth assessments of: (1) the current functions and powers of these four bodies; (2) existing arrangements for the oversight of these bodies by the European Parliament, the Joint Supervisory Bodies and national parliaments; and (3) the legal and institutional frameworks for parliamentary and specialised oversight of security and intelligence agencies in EU Member States and other major democracies.

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Access to and the protection of classified information by the European Parliament

As this study’s analysis of oversight of intelligence agencies at the national level demonstrates, information is the oxygen that sustains oversight; a mandate to oversee an agency’s work is of limited use unless it is accompanied by access to the relevant information. It will be extremely difficult to strengthen parliamentary oversight of the AFSJ bodies without clear and predictable rules and procedures for the EP to access relevant information from these bodies, the Commission and the Council. While access to relevant information is fundamental to oversight, the professional handling of this information by overseers is also crucial for effective oversight. Accordingly, improved access to classified information by the EP will need to be accompanied by the development of appropriate procedures for the protection of this information, as well as an ongoing commitment from MEPs to handle classified information in a professional manner.

Improving the European Parliament’s access to classified information in the AFSJ

The development of an appropriate legal and institutional framework for parliamentary access to classified information is of fundamental importance to strengthening the EP’s oversight of the AFSJ bodies. The discussion of the EP’s access to classified information must take place alongside deliberations on the evolution of the EP’s mandate to oversee the AFSJ bodies; indeed, we have argued throughout this study that an oversight body’s information needs are inextricably linked to its mandate. Yet, regardless of which aspects of the AFSJ bodies’ work the EP wishes to oversee and which institutional mechanism is chosen to carry out this oversight (see below for a discussion of these mechanisms), access to relevant classified information will be crucial. This is because various aspects of the work of AFSJ bodies are classified and/or involve the processing or creation of classified information.

Parliamentary access to classified information is currently being discussed in the context of deliberations regarding the revision of Regulation 1049—legislation which is ostensibly about public access to information from EU entities. The EP’s rapporteur on this matter, Michael Cashman, has opted to include provisions on parliamentary access to information in the broader draft legal framework for public access to EU documents. This approach has several advantages. First, it is aimed at ensuring that there is a general framework for the EP’s access to classified information from all EU entities and across all policy domains. This may be preferable to a fragmented legal framework for parliamentary access to information based on inter-institutional agreements across different fields. The effects of this current framework are that the EP has access to classified information from, e.g., the Council, in some fields but not others and that different modalities apply to access classified information in different policy domains. Second, the inclusion of provisions on the EP’s access to classified information as part of broader legislation on public access to information could help to ensure that these rules have the status of legislation rather than being enshrined in inter-institutional agreements, which are of a subordinate legal status. In spite of these advantages, we are of the view that parliamentary access to classified information should be decoupled from provisions on public access to information. This is supported by practice on the national level, where freedom of/access to information laws are separated entirely from regulations on parliamentary access to information. Parliamentary access to classified information implies access to the specific categories of information which are justifiably exempt from public access, e.g., information regarding the work of intelligence agencies. It is precisely because such information is beyond the reach of public access that it must be available to certain parliamentarians and institutions established by parliaments for overseeing, inter alia, intelligence agencies. In almost every state analysed in this study, parliaments have privileged access to classified information to, among other things, enable to them oversee intelligence activities. This is premised on the notion that parliamentarians are elected by a population to hold governments and their agencies to account. In order to do this, they require privileged access to information which is not necessarily available to members of the public. Therefore, rules governing parliamentary access to classified information are set out in law and are disconnected for general freedom of/access to information laws.

Recommendation 11: New regulations on the European Parliament’s access to classified information should be decoupled from legislation on public access to information.

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4.1.1. The rationale for oversight of intelligence agencies

Many states created parliamentary and other specialised bodies to oversee intelligence agencies in light of revelations about their involvement in illegal and/or improper activities, e.g., Canada, the Czech Republic, Norway, Poland, South Africa, and the US. Notably, during or immediately after the Cold War, it became clear that in many Western states, governments had used intelligence agencies to surveil and disrupt persons involved in legitimate expressions of the rights to freedom of association, assembly and expression. Elsewhere, intelligence agencies were found to have exceeded their legal mandates and powers in tackling domestic terrorism. Perhaps the egregious violations of human rights by intelligence agencies took place in communist/authoritarian regimes, where intelligence agencies were an integral part of the repressive state apparatuses which permeated all areas of society. Against this backdrop, effective oversight (and legal regulation) of intelligence agencies came to be seen as essential for ensuring that they contribute to the security of the populations they serve without undermining democratic processes and human rights. That is, to ‘secure democracy against internal and external enemies without destroying democracy in the process’. Needless to say, the development of oversight of the EU’s AFSJ bodies is taking place in a vastly different climate from the types of conditions that led to the establishment of oversight bodies on the national level. Arguments for robust oversight of intelligence agencies can be distilled into five main areas.

First, and perhaps most importantly, the law gives most intelligence agencies powers that permit them to restrict human rights and which, if misused, could result in the violation of human rights. Indeed, as Canada’s Justice O’Connor stated in the Arar Inquiry: ‘national security activities involve the most intrusive powers of the state: electronic surveillance; search, seizure and forfeiture of property; information collection and exchange with domestic and foreign security intelligence and law enforcement agencies; and, potentially, the detention of and prosecution of individuals’. Intelligence agencies are necessarily given a considerable amount of discretion in their use of intelligence collection powers, which increases the scope for such powers to be misused. In view of this, oversight is necessary to help ensure that such powers are used in accordance with national and international law.

Second, on a national level, the political misuse of intelligence agencies has always been a risk, primarily because these agencies can be used to unlawfully gather information about political opponents. Oversight is seen to be an essential safeguard against incumbent governments using intelligence agencies to protect or promote party political interests. This is less of a concern at the EU level because there is not the same direct relationship of control between the executive and the agencies. Perhaps more importantly, the fact that 27 Member States, the Commission and Council are all involved in the political control of these agencies means that there are in-built checks and balances against there (mis)use by any one party or interest group.

Third, the secrecy surrounding national intelligence agencies shields them from the processes of public accountability which apply to public bodies in democracies. For example, these agencies are not usually particularly open with the media and are often exempt from freedom of information legislation. This makes it difficult for the media, civil society organisations and the public more generally to scrutinise the intelligence agencies’ work. This further increases the need for oversight by independent bodies that have access to information not available to the general public.

Fourth, in common with all public bodies, intelligence agencies are funded with public money and should therefore be held to account for their use of this money. There is particular need for oversight given that intelligence agencies are normally authorised to make secret payments to covert agents. The potential for the inappropriate use of money is heightened in this area. Robust oversight is necessary to ensure that intelligence agencies use public money lawfully and efficiently.

Finally, while oversight is often seen as necessary to guard against the misuse of, and abuse by, intelligence agencies, it also helps to ensure that these agencies fulfil their mandates effectively. Intelligence agencies are, inter alia, entrusted with collecting, analysing and disseminating information about very serious threats to national security and public safety, such as terrorism. The executive and other agencies, such as the police, rely on the information provided by intelligence agencies to take action to combat these threats. Failures by intelligence agencies to perform such functions effectively, e.g., by missing information indicating a terrorist attack, can have catastrophic consequences.

Independent oversight of the work of intelligence agencies helps to ensure that they are as effective as possible.